1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to production order management systems and in particular to production order changes within production order management systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sales order change management is particularly complicated in a configure-to-order environment. Each new version of a sales order must be analyzed and reloaded to a manufacturing division to update the associated production order. Translation of sales order nomenclature to manufacturing nomenclature can be very involved. For example, this translation involves conversion from sales terminology to bills of material, explosion of bills of material into underlying components, assignment of assembly configuration requirements, creation of buildable entities (i.e., units of work), process routing assignment to each unit of work, application of electronic product enablement, manufacturing instructions, etc. An initial load of a production order is quite complicated in many industries but it is greatly magnified when altering a production order that is work-in-process. These changes can often be catastrophic in nature to the manufacturing activities and result in huge loss of productivity, loss in capacity, and/or missed customer shipments and revenue exposures.
A limited portion of the changes that are sent to manufacturing are driven by true orderable content changes received from a sales division. For example, these changes can involve a different feature code or machine type. A larger portion of the remaining changes are related to other characteristics such as: entity grouping of orders, instruction changes such as placement/connection, engineering change (EC) for parts, customer date change (which impacts EC effectivity) and order to order grouping across shipments. In addition, some of these changes include address changes which can impact shipment documentation and require changes to documentation language and/or product label changes. Most systems are geared towards content changes or address/delivery change, and manufacturing plants can invoke rework via a full “change order”. With very complex configurations, it is very likely that the process is stopped, and the product is torn down and rebuilt.